Seattle times radio reporting: look for less of the same
courtesy Seattle Talk Radio blog, 'Blatherwatch'

Slog (the blog of the Seattle News & Arts weekly 'The Stranger) posted an internal Seattle Times memo Friday listing staffers taking the company's buyout offer.

The paper accepted "expressions of interest" from 19 people, who will get the money, take a hike, and their jobs will "simply vaporize" as The Times puts it so poetically.  

Not surprisingly, Florangela Davila, a reporter whose beat is radio -- another medium in deep shit -- was on the list opting for the sweet grass.
                                          
No fault of Florangela's, but frankly, The Times hasn't paid that much attention to the industry anyway. That's been left to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Bill Virgin, a busy business reporter who writes the Wednesday On Radio column, bookmarked by every local  radio staffer in town who can read. Virgin does due diligence with industry press releases, and covers the hard news stories with the kind of access to management BlatherWatch only dreams of. He leaves the sturm, drang, and nasty bits to us, for which we've always been grateful.

Davila's a consummate pro, but her editors have chosen to skim along the rim of the radio niche with feetchs such as the recent one on Luke Burbank, or Larry Nelson's obituary. Understandably, she spends most of her time on teevee, the other half of her A & E beat.

What will happen in the future? Less of the same -- like everything else you can expect in the future reporting from The Times.

Earlier this month, The Times announced Draconian cut-backs including elimination of up to 200 employees. It's unemployment by a thousand cuts: layoffs, job freezes, quiet hallway assassinations, euthanasia, late afternoon stabbings, and Friday beheadings.

Everybody who's not named Blethen or are getting bought, are worried.

The Times, in the same memo announced an ominously golly-gee-whiz sounding re-education program in May called, “Extreme May-kover,” in which they say they'll be "looking at everything we do from a fresh perspective and forging a plan for the future."

(We know this "May-kover" business sounds like BlatherWatch satire, but seriously folks, read the Slog post linked HERE.)  

This reflects a wide industry crisis as metropolitan newspaper circulations shrink from Interweb competition, and the general disinterest in dead tree media of those under 40. Revenues have dropped precipitously.

In an e-mail to staff late last month, Kelly said that, through February, combined print-advertising revenues for the Times and P-I were down 10.7 percent from last year.

More ominously, online-ad revenues fell 6.5 percent year-over-year. While online advertising is only a small fraction of The Times' and other newspapers' total revenue, it has been growing rapidly in recent years.

Many say it is the industry's best hope as it searches for a new business model.

Last month, The Times Co. put its Maine papers — three dailies and one weekly — up for sale, saying it needed cash to help keep its flagship paper afloat.

Though it's hard not to be gleeful about all this, we're not -- despite that legacy media has been so unapproachable, top-down, bureaucratic, haughty, tin-eared to younger demos, and fatally slow to the recognize the significance of the Intertubes.

Less reporting is less good for the Republic; the bottom-line dismantling of these big newsrooms is a net loss for everybody.

Posted by michael hood on April 19, 2008 at 01:37 PM